Afghan Election Dispute Forcing Western Officials to Take a Stand

KABUL, Afghanistan — A growing number of Western officials are calling for an audit of the ballots cast in the Afghan presidential election, increasing the likelihood that the nation’s electoral commission will have to formally reassess the June 14 runoff vote even as it prepares to announce preliminary results.

Ever since Afghans voted in the runoff, the system has been deadlocked by allegations of widespread fraud. The presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah has consistently complained that his opponent, Ashraf Ghani, with the help of the commission and other Afghan officials, rigged the vote.

Mr. Abdullah spent weeks threatening to walk away from the process, and his brinkmanship now appears to be paying off. The continued political crisis has forced some international figures off the bench, despite earlier efforts to avoid the appearance of involvement in the Afghan elections.

Mr. Abdullah has prodded, probed and cajoled both his government and the international community to get involved. He has called the system illegitimate, staged protests and leaked numerous tapes purporting to show election officials conspiring to rig the election in favor of Mr. Ghani.

Now, seemingly recognizing the potential that the political crisis has to turn violent and threaten long-term Western interests in Afghanistan, more international officials are starting to get involved. The most recent voice was that of Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, who spoke to reporters in Kabul on Sunday.

Joined by the American ambassador, James B. Cunningham, Mr. Levin raised the prospect of a dual announcement on Monday, in which Afghan officials would both release preliminary results and announce an audit that would be satisfactory to both candidates.

Just hours later, however, Mr. Abdullah pressed the commission to delay the release until fraudulent ballots have been identified and discarded. While there have been no official results, leaked reports suggested that Mr. Ghani had reversed Mr. Abdullah’s lead from the first round and was ahead in the vote count.

Officials from Mr. Abdullah’s campaign also indicated that the two sides had not reached an agreement on the extent of the audit.

“Until the clean votes are separated from the unclean, we will not accept the result,” Mr. Abdullah said. “Once they are separated, we have nothing to say and will accept the result.”

It was unclear whether the election commission would go through with the release, as promised. The commission has so far delayed results on more than one occasion to help ease the political crisis.

Senator Levin, who warned of dire consequences if the election did not proceed, was only the latest American official to visit Kabul in the past few weeks. Ambassador James Dobbins, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan who announced last week that he is stepping down, was recently in town to urge the candidates to stick with the process.

After Mr. Dobbins came two Republican senators, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who encouraged a thorough audit and also made clear that American aid for Afghanistan would almost certainly dry up if the political crisis was not resolved.

But perhaps the most direct, and first, admonition came from the European Union, which released a strong statement suggesting that an initial audit of 1,930 polling centers was insufficient to unearth all of the fraud.

The monitor said the commission should also take into account “highly improbable votes for one single candidate in polling stations, or unlikely discrepancies between female and male votes.” All told, according to the statement, “the number of problematic polling stations could well exceed 6,000 out of a total of 22,828.”

Seeking common ground, the candidates’ teams have been meeting to discuss an audit, an arrangement brokered with the help of Vice President Yunus Qanooni, among others. A central issue in the talks has been what criteria to use to identify questionable ballot boxes. The election commission has been using polling stations where 599 or more votes were cast, which is how it came up with the original 1,930-station audit.

But Mr. Abdullah’s camp is pressing for more in-depth reviews, arguing that the single criterion catches only the most blatant fraud. In one of the audio recordings leaked by his campaign, people alleged to be election officials are recorded telling others to avoid stuffing ballot boxes with enough votes to set off the fraud review.

The European Union echoed those fears in its statement, released on Thursday.

“I hope that the I.E.C. will be able, in agreement with both candidates, to perform a more in-depth audit,” said Thijs Berman, the chief European Union election observer, referring to the Afghan Independent Election Commission.

So far, the election commission has been reluctant to agree to all of Mr. Abdullah’s demands, which include a broad audit that takes into account seven or eight potential fraud triggers not currently used in the official process. The campaign is especially interested in mostly pro-Ghani provinces where the voter turnout was said to have tripled from the first round.

Underlying the political tensions are ethnic ones.

In a country with a history of ethnic and factional violence, Mr. Abdullah, who is of mixed ethnicity, owes much of his support to ethnic Tajiks, some of whom view the election process as rigged to keep their leaders out of office. Mr. Ghani is of Pashtun ethnicity, the country’s largest, and has garnered widespread backing from that community.

Indeed, the government on Sunday discussed banning Facebook because of the vitriol circulating on social media surrounding the election, but opted not to.

“There were fears that social media is being misused by a number of people to spread hate and harm the national unity and stability,” said Adela Raz, a spokeswoman for President Hamid Karzai. “We have seen many issues affiliated with ethnicity and race recently on social media.”

Haris Kakar contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Afghan Election Dispute Forcing Western Officials to Take a Stand. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe